Computers are used all over the world to perform a wide variety of tasks. Computers perform these tasks by executing software code. Software code is typically written by one or more software developers using some type of integrated development environment (IDE). In many cases, developers are given a set of design instructions, and, using a programming language, draft software code that will implement the functions described in the design specifications. Depending on the nature and scope of the design specifications (or any subsequent modifications thereto), the software program can be both large and complex.
Enterprise software programs, for example, may involve many hundreds or thousands of software files, each file designed to interact with other files within the program and externally with other software programs and/or operating systems. Often, supplemental programs or databases are used to organize, search and maintain the metadata which describes the program and its files. Program metadata consists of information such as the structure of program components, behavior of those components, and other characteristics useful for organization and control. File metadata consists of information such as the date the file was last modified, the size of the file, the file's relation to other files within the software program, and other characteristics useful for organization and control.
Software programs such as repositories typically display and store a software program's files and their corresponding metadata together using an entity-property-value approach (also called the universal schema approach). For example, a repository might list the files alphabetically with the metadata alongside, each portion of metadata corresponding to the appropriate file. In such an example, the repository would list the file (i.e. the entity), each file property's name and a value for the property. Related files would, for example, be shown as a list of related files headed by the kind of relationship (e.g. files related to the file by an automatic generation process). This common entity-property-value approach, however, is cumbersome and ill-suited to providing a customized, user-centric approach. As well as being displayed to the user in this way the metadata is also stored in the repository in an analogous way as a table of entities, a table of property-value pairs and a table of relationship-first entity-second entity triples.
Furthermore, current software repositories typically allow a user (e.g. a developer) to search and/or browse all of the files and their corresponding metadata in the software program. Such search features, however, are only useful to a limited extent and lack many significant features. For example, in practice, repositories contain a wide variety of metadata and, often, the best way to display this metadata will vary between different metadata representations. Current software repositories typically only allow one method of displaying software metadata (i.e. the entity-property-value approach). Furthermore, current software repository search techniques are unacceptably slow and inefficient.